This one hurt
Copious Preamble
That's right; on the tail end of my latest 'Fallout: New Vegas 'playthrough I knew that I had to rock up to that most hyped, and most controversial, of video game mods known as 'Fallout: The Frontier'. Whilst every other Fallout mod enjoyer was getting all hot and bothered about replaying 'Fallout 3: Point Lookout' in Fallout 4's engine, (That's kinda cool I guess, but I'm not head over heels about the idea) I was rocking up to try the most ambitious fan made additional content for a Fallout game ever. Which everyone had already played a year ago- yeah, I'm late to the party but that's just how I roll. I love to get in the door when the house is empty and the treat-table is empty and ready just for me, you know how it is! So after a prolonged effort of finding the mod, the original mind-you, and patching it in after learning it was too big to be worked with my mod manager, how has my experience been? That is a complicated question.
First I have to say that this the single biggest mod I have ever installed for a game, clocking in at about the same size as Fallout New Vegas itself; and that's not space taken up by sound-files and 4k texture files. Whereas the most ambitious mods before this one would stick their descriptions with that proud tag declaring their Mod to be of comparable size to a full-blown Bethesda DLC, 'Fallout: The Frontier' wants you to know that it's pretty much a whole new game. And having literally played through 'New Vegas' in order to build a character specifically for this (And 'Fallout: New California' to start my playthrough and the Someguy2000 series as garnishing. This has pretty much been my ultimate New Vegas playthrough.) I can attest to that. The mod is ungainly big, and I mean both the impressive and negative connotations of that adjective; but before I get into details there is an elephant to discuss.
So I specified 'The Original' when I mentioned sourcing this mod, and let me explain what I mean by that. Back when 'Fallout: The Frontier' was launched, after something like four years of development in the eyes of community, it was met with not exactly the grand welcome the team were hoping for. In fact there was quite a lot of controversy, some of which was directed to some of the supposedly immoral content in the mod that the community took to interpret as perverted or even sexually depraved. This led to the mod being taken off line pretty quickly whilst the team scapegoated one of their members, exorcised him, reworked the content quite a lot, and then put out a new version of 'The Frontier' so drummed back that I think even now it's still not considered a 1.0 version by the team. This I somewhat followed at the time.
Now I'm something of a hard to disturb guy, and when someone tells me I can't experience something because it's too disturbing, I'm going to want to see what all the fuss is about; so of course I sourced a mirror of the original Mod and attached a handy custom Fan Patch to incorporate the performance and bug fixes that the 'official' version of 'The Frontier' has enjoyed up until now. And what has been my takeaway of how ugly and depraved the base version is? As I expected the controversy is a nothing burger, at least in this specific respect. The 'deeply disturbing' content is either laughable or morally in-tone with much of the darkness in base New Vegas. (Remember you can sell your companion to be eaten by cannibals in the vanilla game? I think a lot of people don't.) A lot of the big sticking issues are just badly conceived and implemented, which is actually going to be one of the themes of this review. (Seriously, if people think this is perverted; don't let near some of the personalities in the brilliantly
crafted Someguy2000 series. Remember 'The Judge'? That was a disturbingly perverted creep!)
To preface my little review here I want to remind everyone that I am an amateur writer and the quality of the storytelling is always going to be a big focal point I'll come back to in order to either praise or condemn the mod. That's something which is important to me, so I'm going to harp on it quite a bit. Also, even though this is a free Mod to a game and I typically allow a lot of lenience on account of that fact when looking at Mods; this isn't just a small project from a couple of talented creators who carved off a few months here and there on the thing. This is a huge project manned by a team that bled their full talents over multiple years to make something that was as much a statement to their skills as it was a cool thing just for the heck of it. Which is increadibly commendable and worthy of my unfiltered, no holds barred, opinion on souls and talents laid bare. Also I'm going to spoil some stuff, I'll refrain from big end-of-mod stuff.
Introduction
'Fallout: The Frontier' is one of the most frustratingly mixed experiences I've ever played through in my life and I've gone through most of 'Pathfinder: Kingmaker' on Challenging. Not because of eye wateringly unfair situations in an otherwise sweepingly great game that make you question every choice you've ever made (such as it the case with Pathfinder) but for head-scratchingly terrible directing of unbelievable technical talents that comes together in a package that should have been the single most revolutionary must-play pieces of Fallout content ever made, but just... isn't. I don't even know if I can actually recommend this mod, which is such an insane thing to say that my internal organs are screaming in protest but my brain, and what it had to endure, knows that despite everything I experienced this package was something of a huge mess. And it all comes down to direction, I have to insist, because the technical talent on this mod was godly.
My experience with this mod has imbued me with a duty to warn the curious; when you hear people say that this mod pushes the game to it's limits they mean that implicitly. Which is to say that if you are like me and are running 'Fallout: New California' and maybe a small amount of background mods (I don't have a great deal of gameplay effecting mods, I really like how New Vegas vanilla feels) the game will hit memory limit and crash- a lot. I never had a memory limit crash before I played this mod, and I've had upwards of 80 since that playthrough. The NCR airport is particularly bad for it, even when running the 'reduced NPC toggle' in the Mod manager, but certain odd spots like Junkflea, for some reason, (Which is just a Scav flea market, I thought. I don't even know what's the loading issue there) will literally crash every two or three seconds. I turned every setting to low just to get through those areas unscathed. The lowdown is that whilst this mod is increadibly expansive, offers a totally realised world space and is dripping with places to explore; the 4GB limit on memory (which is the limit after a Patcher required to play the mod) makes it really difficult to enjoy at times. I hear that a certain ENB can extend that limit to 8GB using some sort of wizardry I don't understand, but I don't play with ENBs so I was poop-out-of-luck. (Thank god 'New Vegas' boots quickly, at least!)
Wanting to experience as much as I could, and upset that I couldn't enjoy the open world to it's utmost fullest thanks to the unavoidable memory issue, I had to resort to playing the obvious main questline in The Frontier. The mod actually offers three to the player, and offers a fair bit of variety and unique routes through these questlines, but between The Northern Legion, The Crusaders and The NCR Exiles; the lionshare of the development effort clearly went into the NCR questline. It has sixteen main quests (totally ignoring the bunch of side quests) whereas the other two have nine. Plus, the NCR questline has 'Chapters' splitting the story up for some inane reason, the most technically creative sections put into it and a development story about how it was the most frustrating route to create, which makes sense considering everything they try to do in it. So I obviously played that one despite my initial compulsion to go Crusaders. (Not least of which because the Cover armour featured on the mod is only acquirable, or even viewable, in the Crusader's questline. And trust me, that's hardly even the tip of the 'that sounds short sighted' iceberg.)
Starting out
Right out of the gate the NCR questline puts an incredible foot forward by doing something so jarringly out-of-the-norm for New Vegas that it totally rocked me; on the way to The Frontier they give you a cutscene. I'm not talking about a typical 'New Vegas style' cutscene where the HUD disappears, the game takes control and the scene actors go all 'marionette' for a minute in order to stop you just shooting everything mid-speech; I'm talking multiple perspectives, different angles, scene transitions and cinematography. I can't even conceive of how this was possible aside from what I somewhat guess which is that the game is stealing the HUD and then teleporting you around the scene to serve as the camera. But its so seamless I even doubted my understanding of that until one bugged moment where I got to catch my character sheathe their gun at the start of a cutscene, but even then this is mindblowing.
Let me try and convey why I'm so enthused about this alone. First off, that bugged weapon thing literally happened once across a simply stupid amount of cutscenes, so the fact this system works as well as it does is frightening. Secondly, the mod regularly uses this to depict new scenes in different locations, which makes my head hurt to even conceive! The Gamebyro engine that Fallout New Vegas uses isn't typically adept at keeping multiple areas loaded for rapid scene transition without pop-in, but this mod pulls that off and I don't know how. Sure, proper scene transitions to new locations still require loading, but even then I was floored. Just to let you know the absolute 'high' I was on when we started this mod, so you can comprehend the height from which my mood regularly fell.
This initial introduction leads straight into the first time the game gives you a set-piece perspective shift so that you play as another character in a flash back! This one isn't quite as impressive to figure out; they just give you an outfit with a mask on and mess with your inventory and perks a bit, but it's still totally out-of-the-norm for what Fallout can typically offer you. But it's also here, right at the setting off point for the mod, that I started to pick up on that issue of 'direction' that I've mentioned a bit before. Because whilst it's all cool and everything to conceive and pull off something like this, just ask yourself for a second: Does it fit? Playing through a curated action scene as a badass military guy with regenerating health and explosions and constant gunfights- does that belong in an immersive RPG game? Am I playing this game in order to play your curated action hero, or to go on an adventure with this character I've made for myself and have already gone on all these adventures with? It's not an issue I was thinking about right away, what with the overwhelming excitement of what I was actually playing, but during the more drawn out sections where The Frontier repeats this trick multiple times, it really began to rob the immediacy and immersion from the gameplay. (You know, about as much as having a memory crash every five minutes or so.) 
Now we get introduced to the world of the Frontier and it is- oh wait, no the NCR Exiles storyline wants to keep ahold of you for the next 8 hours. And thus begins a problem I have with the mod so huge that I don't even know if I can define this as a failing in direction or more a failing in common sense. This mod will teleport you around and about the wastes for hours throughout its first act, forcing you into highly choreographed 'Call of Duty' inspired combat scenarios rather than allowing you to explore for five minutes. You need to head somewhere to do a mission? The game will teleport you there with a quick white-out screen. No need to commute and risk actually exploring this vast world that our art team worked tirelessly to create. There is a map the size of New Vegas' (Or there about) to keep the player busy, and the NCR Exiles narrative is terrified to let you out into it! They'd rather stick you doing a over blown, and considerably less fun, version of 'Exodus' from Modern Warfare 2. (The mission where you escort the Honey Badger tank through the streets. Love that mission, didn't like this iteration of it.)
And when it comes to describing the NCR Exiles narrative, something people come back to time and time again is that it feels like budget Call of Duty; because it is. You have extended, exhaustive, bouts of firefights with organised bands of... Scavengers? They're literal scavengers. And for some reason they organise into a force to try and stop a military convey carving it's way through the city with their... Howitzer gun emplacements? (Woah hold on; where are these guys getting scavving all their equipment from?) And then there's another scene where you're forced into someone else's shoes for far too long as you play through action scenes that are totally trivialised through a 'health regen' mechanic the game implants through perks. Let me repeat; they tried to emulate the health regen of COD to make the combat more fast-paced and relentless. Can you figure out the problem here?
The problem is that it's polish on a turd. Everyone knows that Fallout 3 and New Vegas' combat gameplay is utterly serviceable at best, and not particularly thrilling on its own. Instead we have the RPG systems to make things a bit more interesting with mid-fight inventory management, tracking stimpaks and other chems, using VATS and not relying on the shooting itself. This questline attempts to put the action front and centre for this beginning act and it just doesn't come together at all. Street sweeping, dug-out clearing, turret sections; it all sounds good on paper but in practice it's all just noise and tedium. Especially as it's several hours of bloated action set-piece after ill-advised hour-long boss fight between us and the incredible open world which is, I remind you, the selling point of this mod to being with! For a time I genuinely questioned myself whether or not this game had an open world or if it was all just a backdrop for some COD fanatic's dream fangame superimposed on the Fallout framework. Thankfully I was wrong.
Za Warudo
When we actually get to explore the world of Portland, otherwise known as The Frontier, my jaw hit the floor time and time again. This world space is- not what I was expecting. For some reason I expected there to be a lot more hilly wilderness areas but instead the core of this map is relatively flat, with the city of Portland taking up a huge amount of the map. (The hills and slopes are more around the outskirts.) But aside from that this map exceeds my very high expectations. It is incredible, in scale and scope and intrigue. I felt like a kid with my new company of New Vegas all over again, or stepping into that first moment of Fallout 4 (Not so much 3 because that was literally my first open world game and I was more terrified at the openness of it all.) I wanted to touch and explore everything, be everywhere, look at everything! And darn it if the random crash hotspots didn't get in the way of my burning hot passion for this worldspace.
If I've never made it clear before I simply adore ice and snow themed game worlds, and the rime encrusted ruins of Portland perfectly present all the winter wonders of my wildest dreams. The glacial blizzard chills you through the screen, the ice-chunked river makes you wince to touch (although only visually. There's no mechanic of taking damage when swimming in ice-cold waters like there should be.) and the snow covered streets and hills just make me want to jump in the gameworld so I can roll all over them, making snow angels and losing my heart in their drifts. It's quite magical what the team created here. And the winterised NCR gear is simply >Mwah< (That's how you phonetically write 'chefs kiss'.) I only wish I had more reason to wear that glorious Winterized Riot Gear with the fox skin draped around the neck piece out into the Mojave from the base game. It sort of feels out-of-place wearing thermal-tipped-equipment in a land so humid that the patrolling forces are infamous for their desire to endure a nuclear winter over one single day more of sun.
It's just a shame that the art team are the one's who bought it the most, because the writing department certainly didn't show up. Again, I'm going to hit hardest on the topic I know the most about so of course it's going to warrant a reaction out of me when the worldbuilding is bad to the point of nonsensical. The basic foundations of what makes this Mod's premise and the player's involvement in it flies right into poorly written fanfiction territory with nauseating gusto. First off, as I've mentioned quite a few times here; the faction of the NCR you interact with are NCR Exiles. An alright, if uninspired, premise if presented cleverly. (It... it isn't... they don't do it cleverly.) You'd be hard pressed pointing out these so-called Exiles, given the fact that despite their apparently limited number, having spawned from the coup of a single general, they are the single most technologically advanced outfit out of California. Bar none.
They have unexhaustive fleets of Vertibirds, (remember that the NCR only have a few in the vanilla game) fleets of working vehicles such as tanks, (No indication of that for the vanilla NCR) airstrike capabilities with seemingly unlimited strike-range (godforbid if they got their hands on a nuke) and an honest-to-goodness, totally unexplained, (unless its tucked away on some really hidden terminal somewhere) S.H.I.E.L.D Helicarrier right out of the MCU. Try to remember that the state of technology in the pre-war was to the state where Fallout 4's Prydwen, a floating zeppelin, was considered high-tec. And these jokers got themselves a Helicarrier propelled by magical plasma cell juice, as you do. And the worldbuilding gets worse.
How about the Northern Legion? Let's try to comprehend how there's even a force of Legion here to start with, shall we? Take note that this mod takes place in the heart of Orgeon, around the city of Portland. To those of you who don't know the American map that well; that is North of Nevada and the Mojave. The Legion famously spawned out of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona, to the South-East of Nevada. Caesar's Legion has been progressing across Arizona and up into Utah, scooping up tribes in it's wake to grow ever larger, until it comes across an opportunity to prove itself against the NCR at Hoover Dam. That means the bulk of the Legion is going to be at Vegas. So for some reason, whilst Casear has his full forces prepared to prove thermselves against the biggest obstacle in his way to conquering the entire Western coast, a huge contingent of his forces (technological superior to his forces waiting in the Mojave, because of course) is stationed up in the boonies 900 miles away? And believe it or not, this gets even stupider beyond the tactical analysis.
Because of course these Legion can't just be a Northern contingent that somehow pushed itself several hundreds of miles north without breaking apart despite the very concept and structure of Caesar's Legion only existing and working because of it's implicitly centralised rule around the figure of Caesar himself, (as stated by the man, in his own words) but they actually adopt technology and use it in their warfare. Again, this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the faction in question is about, because one of Caesar's core founding principals, which you'd imagine would have to be drilled into these ice-brained idiots if they're following his orders 900 miles away from his influence, is the forsaking of technology because he claims the dependence it creates weakens the men who use it. This is core principal stuff, key separating characteristic between the Legion and NCR, antithesis meeting thesis 'Hegelian dialectics' style, and these writers just forgot about it. The same way they forgot that the position of 'Legate' isn't just a mirror of 'general'. There's only supposed to be one Legate, which is why Caesar had to dispose of the Malpais Legate (Joshua Graham) before he could recruit The Monster of the East, Lanius as his Legate. If you break it down to its etomology, the 'Legion' corresponds to a single roman army, and as a Legate is the sole commander of an army, there can only be one Legate. And yet, of course, the leader of the Northern Legion is Legate Valerius, because researching the topic you're writing about with Google searching is hard, I guess. (I have no clue how I manage it.)
And the Crusaders... are alright I guess. I have no idea why the creatives behind the Frontier felt the need to revamp the Brotherhood of Steel and in doing so make them more medieval themed, with Castellans and carrying the odd real-forged sword into battle for some utterly incomprehensible reason. (You have power armour and chainsaw daggers; why do you need metal swords?) It kind of feels redundant. I understand that the inclusion of Mormonism was supposed to shake up their image, but all it really seems to amount to is Tasha Weaver spouting our vaguely ecclesiastical rhetoric in dialogue moments that never really underline the purpose of a specific scene in a powerful manner as such themes sometimes can, but more serves as general wishy-washy colouring to let you know that this character does read some scripture. Probably. Even if she doesn't know how to contextualise it.
The writing quality
You might be picking up on a few themes here and there just from me describing the ill-thought out and fan-fiction-y worldbuilding, and allow me to reiterate: this mod's writing is simplistic. Not utterly poor, at least not the whole way through, but prevailingly, frustratingly, uninspired and mediocre. It comes out most obviously in dialogue, and of course taints the NCR characters the worst. The writers seem to have substituted all the personality of the NCR as a Fallout faction with 'generic American military grunt' such that this feels like a grunt-division of the Enclave more than a NCR contingent. Their dialogue is dry and the NCR characters are all typically one-note, even the one's who you spend a considerable amount of game-time around. I think the problem might have been that there were so many of them it became hard flesh out any one person.
The story, and this part is mostly aimed squarely at the NCR questline as I only got to dip my toes in the other questlines, does absolutely nothing surprising or risky in it's hefty length, even though I think the writers really believe it does. Even when things start to pick up, around about the second and third act after that abysmal introduction slog, the story merely rises from "This hurts to endure please cut off my ears" to "I can shut off my brain and have dumb fun here"; which is an improvement, sure; but after multiple years in the oven someone could have done a lot better. And sure, I'm saying this after having enjoyed beautifully well-written mods in the same playthrough such as the gorgeous 'Autumn Leaves', the exciting 'Someguy2000 collection', and even ''Cogito Ergo Sum' boasted increadibly snappy dialogue. The comparison isn't going to be favourable unless The Frontier was rocking actual employable writers; but it shouldn't be this stale either. It also makes me think that whoever was writing the main narrative either didn't care or was trying to wrestle something salvageable against another writing force who was a total train wreck. (And whom had total control of the first chapter.)
Do you like- my car?
But this is getting too negative for the moment, I'm starting to hate myself. How about I pick at another positive; like the vehicles! Again, the technical team soar in to save the day; what they achieved with making working tanks and armoured cars in Fallout is actual Gandalf-level magic. There is minimal jank here. I've played the various 'driving cars'/'Mech suit' mods for New Vegas over the years, and I know the sort of quality they offer; you always know what you're playing is a haphazard wonderglue job onto a base it wasn't made for. In The Frontier, despite some fiddliness with the turret of the tank, that nagging reminder of 'this doesn't belong' is non existent. These vehicles feel natural, they control appropriately, and the vehicle combat sections- honestly go one way too long so as to overstay it's welcome as literally everything in this mod does, but they function and make up actual gameplay. Even if that gameplay does feel like another bad 'Call of Duty' level.
Meet my friends
As this mod provides such a big world space to explore, and so many bullet sponge foes to battle in that space including gun emplacements and enemy vehicles, it only makes sense that The Frontier provides us with companions; and this mod has a fair few. More than there are in vanilla New Vegas in fact! And these are fully realised for the most part, with personalities and companion quests, and a sort of inconsistent framing of a couple. Unlike with the base game a few of the companions will lock themselves out of their quests if you aren't playing the faction they're involved with; I appreciate the incentive to stick to your guns with a faction, I actually played so wishy washy in my current New Vegas playthrough that Ulysses had no clue which faction I was sided to and ended up threating the guys I was antagonising. (I can only speculate at how confused he was when I stopped his nuke only to fire it at the exact target he already primed.) But whenever you tell a player they have to play a certain way and lock out content to enforce it, there's a definite bad taste being left in some mouths there.
As for the character's themselves I can happily report that they were mostly a decent bunch, although some were clearly more fleshed out than others. And unlike in the Vanilla game where the companions are mostly all laid around the critical path so you're likely to naturally run into them throughout the progression of the game, these guys are all over the place; I could have easily missed out on the entire roster if I hadn't gotten curious and looked them up. Although there are a choice few that seem almost comically barebones. Take Lot, for instance. A character who is, shall we say, atypically morally aligned; but in such an unapologetic and almost surprised-to-be-judged manner that he comes across as remarkably unlikeable once you learn the truth about him. There's a real trick to writing a character who is intentionally unpleasant in way that feels believable, as I've mentioned when talking about Pillar's of Eternity's 'Durance'; but then I'm not even sure about that. Lot's ending card slate seems to hint at a sort of redemption arc which he seemed utterly non-interested in during his entire companion quest, which makes me wonder when the writers didn't go all the way and have him continue on as an asshole.
Wrench, on the otherhand, is a perfectly executed character for what they wanted to do with her. You get a grasp for who she is, underestimate her depth and assume her to just be a mercenary before her repeated interjections on your actions imply there's something more to her going on. Eventually she opens up and reveals a bit more about herself giving the player insight into who she was before with some actually shockingly decent dialogue. (after enduring the bulk of the NCR Exiles' writing, decent is shocking.) Then the player has the opportunity to go on a quest and influence her personal journey positively affecting her life onwards. That is literally what I ask of every companion and the team actually pulled it off perfectly with her. I mean, there's no actual choice inside of the quest to change her fate, it's the doing of the quest alone that is the choice; but it's meaningful interaction and I love that!
And then there's America. Yeah, she's the big controversial point hanging over every criticism of The Frontier 1.0, isn't she. I'll be honest, I don't get it. Okay, I sort of get it; but I still think it's a bit overblown. Does she have some kind of weird ambient chatter? Yeah. She says some stuff that's not what I would have written for her to say, let's just say that. But what is she really? She's a kind of annoying girl living with the Crusaders with obnoxiously overbearing abandonment issues that she vomits all over the player in your first couple of interactions. Imagine expositing your darkest insecurity upon a stranger you literally bumped into in the lobby; that's what she does. She's below average as far as companions go, and I didn't mind ignoring her quest (completing it would have locked my out of the NCR questline) because getting her bad ending was meaningless to me. And yet there is another controversial point...
The enslaving. Here's another example of bewildering implementation. The act of enslaving your companion is not, in itself, out of left field for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and it's tone. Remember: you can feed your companions to cannibals in vanilla. But for me it's just the abruptness of meeting this girl through a pretty forced interaction as part of the Crusader's introductory questline, having her life story unceremoniously dumped on you, having her become your companion and from that exact moment onwards being able to enslave her. Just out of the blue. She joins the player and you'll forever have the dialogue options to try and trick a slave collar around her neck from the supply of explosive collars that you have on you magically for some reason. It's not as if this is a theme or something, you can't enslave any other companions, or anyone else for that matter. (Outside of some choice moments in the Legion campaign.) Why America? Why so abruptly? I know you don't always need a reason to be evil in these games, the spontaneousness is part of the fun; but this particular action feels so spontaneous that it almost feels like an undue expectation. Am I supposed to want to enslave her? Why? Did I miss the memo on why she'd make a good slave? I don't really like having America hanging around me of her own volition, she's kind of whiny and she says weird stuff about her feet smelling, why would I want to force her to be around me more? Chalk this up to yet another reason why a mod of this size really needed a director.
But if there is one critique I have about the companion system overall, one huge missed opportunity; it's that the companions feel totally superfluous to the events of the main story. I mean you'll get the odd comment here and there, a warning that they'll leave if you continue working with this faction, but they aren't actually integrated into any questlines. Which is fine, doing that would be going above and beyond anyway. But The Frontier goes one step further. You're actually not allowed to bring your companions on most missions. In the same moment that the game likes to teleport you from main objective to main objective like you're freakin' Steven Grant hitting a fugue state between commutes, the game slips your companions out of reality and gives them back when your done. So all the cool set-pieces and big battles, I have to have them with my crappy faction squadmates and not the companions who carry my burdens about the place. I assume it's a question of balancing, the same reason why the mod asks to confiscate all your items when you start. (And doesn't give them back to you when it finishes, it makes you go and find them.) But it feels kind of belittling that these mod authors didn't trust us to manage our own gameplay balancing. Hey Frontier Team, you realise all your players are on PCs, right? If we want to cheat, we can console command 'kill' anything; we know how to exercise restraint. Besides, blocking off all companions from any important story beat, even just to show up for emotional support, makes their existence feel superfluous.
When I came to cementing the campaign I wanted to play, I had a choice between NCR and the Crusaders. The imbalance of content is what shifted me the NCR's way, as I knew from glancing at the questlist that the NCR Exiles' questline was the only route to getting aboard the absolutely giant space station level. Yes, there is a space station level in 'Fallout: The Frontier' and it is an incredible spectacle. I'm talking, 'highlight of the mod' tier set-piece; and you only get to see it with the NCR. It kind of makes you think that the other questlines were a bit of an afterthought, huh. It was a bit of a shame because to be honest I was kind of feeling the Crusaders a bit more at that time; not least of all because I didn't crash at their headquarters every 5 minutes along with the undeniable fact that the odd desultory scripture quote in dialogue packs a pinch more flavour than milquetoast military cliché drivel all day long. But how could I pass up a trip to space? If I did that I'd be no better than Pete Davidson; and then where would I be?
The reason that there's a space station in this mod would classify as a big spoiler but given how utterly generic this writing is I'm 100 percent sure that if you've even played a single Fallout game since the first one before you can probably figure it out at a guess. Take a single second to think of how a space station would be introduced into this world, and literally your first guess is right. Incredible, how did you do it? Heck, they even introduce the concept of the space station through a nearly identical scene to how the orbital platform in Fallout 3 is shown off; only this time it makes no sense because the scenario writer favoured sceptical over coherence. (Why would these guys reveal themselves, and their capabilities, getting involved in a small scale skirmish with a bunch of scavs that they had no stake in? It's literally like they were just saying 'this plot feels kind of dull, can we come over to shake it up a bit?')
But here the ribbing stops. I fully shut my mouth because the space station is jus- wait, hold on I can't move on without making fun of the concept Vertishuttles for a second. (Verishuttles? Really? VTOL shuttles? I thought the entire point of a VTOL craft was for rapid deployment; you're going to rapidly deploy attack fleets from freakin' space? It's really going to take 12 hours for every attack team to hit the surface; the backup will arrive by the time everyone's gone to sleep!) Ahem. So- the space station is a marvel. Truly incredible. Right out of a sci-fi movie and not in a basic retexture of Mothership Zeta or something. This environment is almost totally custom, with glowing LED stripes lining the hallways and custom animation airlock doors that take 3 seconds too long to cycle for how many there are, and even bright neon lattice tucked away here and there and even on some enemy armours! Oh, and inexplicable barricades on the inside of the ship hallways, which is actually a concept nicked from Mothership Zeta. (Woah, these guys were really prepared for a completely unpredictable invasion, weren't they?)
As exciting as it looks, the station makes an even better playspace. I mean sure, it's a shooting gallery for the most part. But a shooting gallery with remarkable visuals, a smattering of differing enemy types with amazing custom skins, bunches of superbly high-quality custom guns to shoot them with, and a distinct lack of interaction with your terminally boring NCR spacemates. (For the most part. They swoop in to ruin your day here and there when they feel like it.) I had so much fun exploring this zone, mostly crash free, that I able to actually forget some of those initial pains that felt insurmountable to begin with. This single, bloated, several hours too long, mission thread saved a lot of this mod for me when I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue at times! (I was that on the ropes!) A lot of it was really fun bar one fiddly set-piece section that seemed to have wanted me to sprint in order to avoid a scripted death, which is strange because there is no sprint button in vanilla Vegas and I certainly don't remember seeing a sprint-enabling mod on the list of required mods.
However, if there is one thing I might critique: I seriously cannot tell if the 'references' in this particular part of the mod count as funny referential humour classic to the Fallout games, or just bad plagiarism in the vein of 'Hunt down the Freeman'? (Okay I'm exaggerating there. Little could be as bad as 'Hunt down the Freeman's cringe MGSV rip-off scenes. But the fact that this mod made me remember that trainwreck at any point, is not a glowing endorsement.) Of course I refer to the machinations of the Enclave guy who- (Whoops I let it slip... meh, it wasn't a shock to anyone anyway) literally is just Deathshead from 'Wolfenstein: The New Order'. He has an inexplicable German accent, similar facial scars, and an identical scene to the 'capture' scene from that game, where the game makes you choose between two companions you hardly know to decide who's about to be spliced. Heck, the name of the cell in that this decision happens in, within the game files themselves, is literally called 'Deathshead'. Is it a 'loving send up' if you just copy the events and presentation whole hog with as minimal alterations as possible to fit Fallout lore? I genuinely have trouble answering this, please give me your opinion.
But of course the Space station section wasn't perfect. As I mentioned it goes on way too long, (but the whole space is so remarkable that you'll kind of let it.) the area throws way too many new armours at you knowing full well that you'll never be able to carry them all back and you're not allowed to bring companions and leaving unique area gear just feels like a sin to my item-hoarder soul. (It doesn't matter that I'll never wear it; I need to own one of every armour type.) Oh, and they decided to throw in a Ubisoft-style dream sequence. Oh yeah; it's impressive from a technical level what they can do, as always, but my god is it a momentum killing time sink. I was nodding off thirty minutes in and I still had another thirty to go; it was miserable as all utterly unproductive dream sequences are. But I'll get more into that later.
And yet everytime I want to rage I come back around when remembering the variety of gameplay moments in this mod. You have straight shooting gallery scenes, as is standard in this mod, but then you have a honest-to-god open space jumping section! There's also a turret defence snippet against asteroids, and a zombie swarm area, a close range boss fight against an enemy with way-too-much health, a wave defence set-piece, and just everything you could ask to make this several hour long slog feel fresh. These didn't feel like mechanics heavy levels in the early game, where your time was wasted enduring a well made system that did not have the depth to sustain an entire level of interest; (like the tank defence mission or the vehicle mission) they feel like genuine snippets of gameplay variety chucked into a wagon train of a mission to create easily one of the best designed missions in the mod. Oh, and it has a mechanical boss fight at the end. I'm not talking about a-boss-made-from-mechanical-parts, although he is; I mean a boss with functional boss mechanics unlike anything the Fallout franchise has done before. (Once again; I stand agog.)
Boss Fights
Speaking of boss fights, The Frontier has a fair few of them and they're definitely worthy of a section all to their own. The humble boss fight is a time honoured video game design technique of rounding out a stretch of content with an exciting and sometimes challenging summation of the action, narrative or gameplay pieces. (And on a good day; all three) The boss I just mentioned, the robot aboard the space station, is easily the most incredible the Frontier has to offer. (Which is yet another reason why the NCR Exiles questline really shouldn't hold the Space station section hostage to itself.) The boss is almost worthy of a Portal game with the way it's laid out, and I mean that to be as high of praise as it sounds. What got me the most was the fact that is functioned. And I know I keep coming back to that, but New Vegas isn't the most stable game at the best of times. It was slapped together in a year by a studio who, admittedly, seems to have many priors in making something out of nothing in a year or under; but still means the game is held together by shoestrings and silly putty. The eldritch magic that the Frontier team must have deployed to get everything working this smoothly is honestly terrifying because they've definitely spelled the doom of all humanity with their profane practice. I can only hope their meddling in the old arts only shatters the dream-prison of Ln'eta, so that our final mind-shattering nightmare can at least be a pleasant one.
But not all the bosses are quite so cool as all that. In fact, one of the first bosses, at least for the NCR questline, is against the Legion's only tank; and on the hard difficulty it is the most tedious fight in the game. (And I fought Marko in the Someguy2000 mod collection.) Again, there's a mechanic to it, but it's one that moves the fight along at a snail's pace, all the while watching the clock go by and wondering why this hasn't ended yet. The fight took me twenty five minutes. For one boss. (Unbelievable.) And the only other real bosses of note are more traditional 'guy with big health bar' fight, which I find to be totally serviceable. Unless you stick me in a narrow room with no cover from them, so thanks so much for doing that on the Space station.
Music
Before I forget, as I typically always do, it's important I touch on the music; because it is all custom. Like all of the building blocks that makes up the NCR portion of this mod, the NCR music suite is stuffed with generic lazy military rock that just does not fit the NCR as a faction. It would fit a blind reimaging of the US military, but again, the NCR have more nuance than that! As for every other track, the music ranged from pleasingly atmospheric to weird in good way. There was this one battle theme in particular which sounded nothing like something you'd expect to get you pumped for a fight but had just enough vaguely-techno beat in it to worm into my heart and become something I actively bumped to whenever it switched on. I don't physical dance to any other incidental music in New Vegas, so the Frontier can take that dubious honour for a point in it's favour, if it wants it. But it should bask in that positivity because I'm about to ping-pong back to one of my most hated aspect about amateur independent projects the world over: bad dream sequences.
Dream Sequences
Do you know what's bad about a dream sequence where it doesn't belong? Well mechanically they're an unnecessary stop-gap in the narrative that tips all impulse in the plot right out the window in favour of, typically banal, existentialism and abstract symbolism. It's an invitation for writers to put down the pens and let the creative minds of the artists take over, which in itself is a magnet for poor commentary. A concerned and perceptive artist knows that a dream sequence is not an excuse to get lazy, but a challenge to stretch the very extremities of their creative talent to weave ingenuity and exposition in a concise and sometimes even a profound way. In the same vein that it's said how art is just as much about what you leave out of the picture, carving a blank, rule-less, slate should be an exercise in informed and intuitive discipline.
Or you could just throw the audience into a ropey horror house where they regularly get attacked by faceless mannequins with names like 'Anxiety' and 'Fear' and 'Indignation'. Look, the creativity is there, and there's talent to pull off the stranger ideas, but there's no actual meaningful substance to any of it. And because this section of the game wasn't created with a purpose in mind, a point of the plot that had to be told, the sequence just goes on and on and on. It doesn't have a purpose beyond existing, afterall; so how can the team know when they've made enough to fulfil its purpose? The vault dream sequence meanders for a truly tortuous length of time, during which you have no progress in the core narrative, are learning nothing interesting about your own motives, (which is a theme that the dream sequence half-heartedly tried to pursue) and are regularly forced to partake in Fallout's notoriously under-developed melee systems in fights for your life. Everytime the spectacle threatens to deliver just enough to suspend your disbelief, you bump into a dead-faced clone of your hero who walks up to you and says "I've done it. I have defeated the bad guy. That makes me the hero." (That is verbatim, by the way.)
I mean come on, that's infantile levels of 'turning the question of morality back on the player'. The best they could come up with, on the infinite, unshackled plains of a dream sequence, was "You do things but have to kill to do them and killing is bad so maybe you bad?" Oh and don't forget "Bad things happen to you so feel emotions about them like sadness but sadness is also dream guy who try to attack you so you have to shoot sadness." It's a shame because when I say the visual creativity is on point, I mean it. If I wasn't in tears begging for the dream sequence to end because it's already gone on for an hour and a half, I was genuinely enjoying the weirdness of running around as a headless lobotomy patient or having spear-fights with giant exploding mannequin men. Either the writing team needed a shake up or, once again, the project needed a director to forcibly turn off people's computer and go "You've made enough, anymore and this section will be boring."
Bites Za Dusto
As I'd come to expect from the NCR Exiles narrative by this point, the resolution to the narrative is suitably action packed and awkwardly structured so that the main plotline reaches a crescendo about five times straight. (I thought I was watching Matt Reeves' 'The Batman' with all the consecutive story climaxes) But even though I think it was an increadibly bizarre mistake to deal with the factions in the order that they did, I will admit to actually liking the final act of this story worlds more than I enjoyed the introduction; both in writing and gameplay. Enough to make we wonder if separate teams put these two halves of the campaign together or if this one team just didn't know how to handle introductions. (Which would be fair; starting a story is often the hardest step if you haven't figured out the ending already.) By the tail end of the story the mod pretty much becomes set-piece after set-piece, which actually becomes a lot more tolerable when 'A.' you're constantly in control and immersed in the main character and 'B.' the team remembers that a cool gameplay section only stays cool for as long as the scene is a novelty. I was genuinely shocked when the bunker bash against the Crusaders wrapped in less than two hours. And genuinely happy too, because I got to leave that encounter just as excited as I was when I entered it.
I have to take off points for the twist, because similar to 'Hidden Agenda' by Supermassive games; the team pulled the old 'the most suspicious looking and sounding guy is the culprit' trick, only this time the sincerity of the narrative didn't manage to pull my bluff. I clocked the main villain the very second he was introduced and spent the entire time just trying to guess the moment he would strike. I mean they literally gave him the most Saturday cartoon villain name possible; how could he not have been the twist villian? And to summarize his presence and story- he was pretty mediocre. At least he wasn't ideologically driven, because everytime these NCR Exiles spouted their grade-level understanding of military discourse I felt my grey matter leaking out of my ear holes.
I actually think the prolonged final mission was suitably exciting and bullet-filled and explosive, with some different gameplay challenges sprinkled in there to keep things interesting. It wasn't quite as ambitious as the Space station, but it was still grand and appropriate enough to be a finale for such a huge mod. One scene I found to be vaguely reminiscent of 'Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots' later, and you get to have a pretty climatic final boss fight against a beefy, but not too beefy, final boss. I loved the spectacle of it all, it felt like the big budget finale of a particularly meat-brained Bond movie. But not the ending of Quantum of Solace because I actually fondly remember this sequence and I'm frankly amazed I even remembered Quantum of Solace's name without looking it up. (It took a second to get there.) Was it a finale good enough to redeem everything up until then? Not even nearly, it would have had to have been more than perfect, it would need to be legendary to pull that off. And instead it was great. But great is better than good, and leaving the player on a high note is entertainment 101.
In Summary
'Fallout: The Frontier' has a great many faces, and a lot of them are frustrating. From overambition eclipsing hard software limitation, to the odd buggy quest, to the terrible content balancing, the even worse writing, and rampant, egregious, plot holes. But it's also one of the most impressive feats of modding engineering ever made. I just keep coming back wishing that every aspect of this mod lived up to the technical talent on full display. (and visual talents. The world looks beautiful) But for every abject success on the part of the technical talent, creating working vehicular combat and multi-layered boss fights, there's a thoughtless implementation squandering the hard work. Bad decisions pile up high enough to sully the package, which is a tremendous shame given the heretofore unprecedented collection of ambitious and creative minds who poured their passion into The Frontier. I found sparks of an incredible experience tucked in the middle of this mod in the NCR playthrough, and a decent adventure closing out the end, but the rest of the package felt like a messy scramble of spectacular individual elements that just never managed to make it together. 
As a package, for the frustration it caused, I honestly wouldn't recommend playing it. But for the artistry behind the mod I'd at least say watch someone else play it so you can enjoy the spectacle without the vexations. The biggest mod in modding history deserved better than this, and the controversial reputation it has fostered is more than a little overblown. Taking this package for all of it's successes, I would have no problems fixing this review with a shiny A+ badge; but when weighed down with the technical difficulties, the poor to mediocre writing, the terrible mission layout design, the uninspired worldbuilding, weak characters and uneven pacing; I'm left somewhere nearer a D when evaluating the whole experience. But then I recall how much of a high note it left on (at least on the NCR Exiles campaign. The other two was surprisingly cut-and-dry by comparison.) and I have to squeeze that up to an D+ Grade; for good behaviour. I think it's the disappoint which weighs the most on me, both for what I know this mod could have been and for myself in not managing to like it. I just hope the talents who made this go onto develop more in the future, because the technical team have a game development future waiting for them if they want to take it, no doubt.
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